PAX East 2016: Chronicles of Elyria, age wisely!

Chronicles of Elyria is a community driven open world sandbox MMO developed by Soulbound Studios. There is no class system and anyone can learn any skill. Now slow down you Sword Arts Online Kirito fanboys, don’t go running out there seeking for the dual wield skill and find yourself an Asuna now. This is a High Fantasy genre MMO, no cute Asuna here.

Reborn/Pay System

After you reborn you would need to progress a bit to be able to catch up to where you left behind, because I mean a 5 year old would not be able to wield a greatsword gracefully. So basically the more x amount of reborns the better your skills and stats would be. But going out there and permanent death as an 18 years old 20 times in a row would not benefit you much as well. You would want to live as long as you can to earn more stats and skills and then reborn when you must. When your soul dies depends on your existing life line. Also along with permanent death there are 2 other kinds, a simple death where you get knocked out for 3 mins, a death where someone stab you after and is able to loot your equipment but not inventory, the last death is permanent death is when you die so bad your soul doesn’t even want to go back to your body cause you sucked that much. No worries though the permanent death happens rarely.

So booty-ful!

What sets Chronicles of Elyria apart from other MMO is the pay system. It is not free to play, it is not pay once to play forever. Its pay for one life and use it to the best of your ability or else you will end up paying again soon. This creates a higher risk system for player as they venture into their adventure. When you die, you will lose part of your soul. One payment of life is about 1 year worth of real life time. Each death would be about 2hrs of your grand total life. If you think about it on the larger scale basic deaths doesn’t seem that bad after all. But be careful, other types of death will take more of your total lifespan. So how would Chronicles of Elyria generate money?

Well high risk action would cause you to lose more of your total life. For example, PK would make you lose more grand total life.

Too purrty

This will make people think twice before they go out on a killing spree. Especially how your character can never really log out (hello to .hack//sign, Log Horizon, SAO etc) but its ok you as a person can step away from the computer and not die in real life. With OPC (Offline Player Character) it will be very tempting to just kill a few off as they venture to do their task while the owner is offline. I mean free loots right? Those free loots will come at a cost before there is a bounty system and the punishment will always be greater than the crime.

Offline Player Character

The OPC feature in this game is very interesting, before you log off you can assign task for your character to do so when you’re on you can enjoy the game instead of doing such mundane task like spending 3 hours to walk on feet to the other side of the country for a dungeon. But why walk alone you lonely OPC, you can set your OPC to walk with a group of people. While you’re at it make it an Oregon Trail journey and go in a group of people in wagon maybe. Fear not, you will not have died of dysentery.

Combat System

Speaking of deaths and being murdered by other players, the best way to prevent this is not having the most overpowered gear in the game, even though it may help a bit, but it is to hone your pvp combat skill. It is stated that the combat system is player skill based. Timing and predicting deflect, parry or dodge will help you defeat your opponent. In idea this sounds great but the only thing I’m so jaded about is the ping issue. Sure pvp combat that is action and reaction related works great in countries like Japan or Korea because they do not have third world country internet like America do. Also they have less land to cover as well, unlike if someone from Los Angeles decide to pvp with someone in New York and the server is in Montreal, Ontario Canada (looking at you here FF14), the person who lives closer to the server will have a bigger advantage.

I tried the pvp myself in Chronicles of Elyria and I must say it is pretty balanced as of now. As you attack you would use up this energy bar thing so no spamming attack for you. Best way to go about is get aggressive, fake an opening so your enemy decide to attack, anticipate it, parry and counter attack with combos. So yea seems pretty player skill based to me.

Skill system

The skill system in this game is where you would have to learn from another person. That’s right. You would have to interact with others in an ONLINE game to get things DONE, what a concept huh? Many other Mmo-ers don’t really get that nowadays. Maybe such a system would really bring the community together, or split it apart with factions and war. Even with that, it sounds very exciting. Reminds me of the days in Lineage 2 when clans would fight each other to the death over rare spawns and castles. It gives MMOs more of a charm where the community is in charge of events instead of soulless scripted based inputs.

I have high hope for Chronicles of Elyria as I wish it will live up to all its feature that makes it stand out from other MMO. I look forward to playing the finishing product or even to beta test.

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